The Golden Touch

by Laura London

Genres: Sagas; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

WHEN THE BAD BOY ROCK STAR RIDES INTO TOWN . . . Kathy Carter has seen many things in her small-town instrument repair shop. But never has a dangerously hot, world-famous rock star pulled up on his motorcycle, needing his guitar fixed. Kathy's not surprised to find he's endlessly sexy, with a voice that would make any woman's heart melt. What she doesn't expect: he wants her bad. Neil meets a lot of women who would do anything to be with him. Sweet, beautiful Kathy is nothing like them. She doesn't care about fame, and that's why he can't keep his mind-or his hands-off her. Yet once things start getting hot, Kathy pulls away. Soon Neil realizes that it's more than his life in the limelight that scares her. When the ghosts of the past make a guest appearance, Neil and Kathy must decide if what they have is forever, or if Neil is still a solo act . . . From the author of the beloved classic romance The Windflower, available for the first time as an ebook.

Release date: May 6, 2014

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 193

Sample

Kathy Allison Carter was locked in a stare-down with a sousaphone. The sousaphone was winning. She thought of the sign she had hung so hopefully over the door of the little storefront two years ago: “Kathy Carter’s Instrument Repair.” Instrument Disrepair, she thought ruefully. The sousaphone was in worse shape from her attempts to repair it than it had been when it was brought in. Before it had been playable, though battered with dents. Now, John Philip Sousa himself couldn’t have gotten a note out of it.

She should have known better than to start on the sousaphone at this stage of her eroded patience. Today was Saturday, and it was spring in Apple Grove, Wisconsin. Outside of her shop, the golden sun was slanting long rays over the shower-dampened lilac bushes which grew in the median strip of Broad Street, sending up a heady scent and lavender sheen which competed with the brilliant pink of the flowering crabapple trees that grew on the grounds of the courthouse at the end of the street. But inside, Kathy was sitting back at her workbench, pondering the events which had led to her sitting inside on such a lovely spring day, at the age of twenty-four, wrestling with a brass band instrument that had also, perhaps, seen better days.

It may have had something to do with her father being a minister; or maybe that meant she should have known better. But when Mr. Woods, the high school music director, had asked people to search their attics and basements for old instruments to donate to the community orchestra, it had been Kathy’s own voice which had cheerfully piped up, volunteering to repair the instruments at cost, on her own time. But she hadn’t been prepared for a flute twisted into the shape of a boomerang or a clarinet that had been carrying a peanut butter sandwich for twenty years. Saturday was normally the day she closed the shop, but here she was, working away, finally losing her sense of humor after crouching over her workbench for twelve straight hours.

Glaring into the sousaphone’s bell, Kathy studied her reflection, which the flaring brass surface mischievously distorted in the manner of a fun-house mirror. Her small nose looked big and the dark hair knotted on top of her head trickled around her exaggeratedly tapered cheeks like squiggly snakes. And her nicely rounded chin had shrunk to nothing. Her neck, in the reflection, had disappeared completely into her buttoned-to-the-top Peter Pan collar, which was good, because to her it seemed too long anyway. The long legs, long arms, and long neck that looked so chic on the models in Vogue were—well—just plain excessive on herself. Lanky Kathy. She smiled, threw back her head, and said aloud, “Does anyone realize how noble I am? How selfless? How… hungry?”

Her stomach was empty. She had eaten a cup of blueberry yogurt that morning, but upstairs in her little apartment she was out of milk, out of bread, out of fruit, out of orange juice, out of everything. Every hour she’d half-decided to take a break and walk down to the supermarket before it closed, but she was on one of her work binges today. A vein throbbed in her head. Incipient headache.

Someone tapped on the glass of the shop’s front window, and Kathy turned her head to see Marijo Johnson, one of her piano students, with sunlight finding the gold tones in her very red hair. Having attracted Kathy’s attention, Marijo waved enthusiastically, opening her fleece jacket to show off a green t-shirt so Kathy could see the silk-screened picture of a rock star on it. Neil Stratton. It seemed like every other person under thirty in town had one. The guy must be making a fortune. Kathy mouthed the words “Very nice!” at Marijo and, satisfied, the teenager went away.

Kathy blinked twice to clear the haze in her tired vision and admired her shop. The grape ivy hanging in the corner needed trimming, but it looked tropically lush, and brightly colored posters hung on the wall advertising different musical instruments. There was a counter spray-painted white that she and her dad had hammered together, and on it a little cardboard display holding calendars and ticket order forms for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Her workbench, which she had bought at a farm auction along with her desk, was scattered with the tools of her trade, and a bulletin board hung on the wall by the door, the feature of her shop she liked the most. She allowed people to tack handwritten advertisements of items for sale and notices of meetings on it. And she had a music box on her desk, one she had had since she was a little girl, with bears on it.

It was time for five minutes’ rest. It wouldn’t do her any harm. As Kathy pushed the sousaphone away and leaned back to stretch and yawn, she saw red behind her closed eyelids. She hadn’t had much sleep the night before—at one o’clock in the morning after the movie had let out a gang of kids had driven up and down Broad Street honking their horns. Maybe she would make the rest ten minutes.

She reached for the knob of her old gray plastic radio and turned it on. An ad blared out for Neil Stratton’s concert at Nordic Valley, the nearby ski resort which doubled in summer as an outdoor concert arena, a natural amphitheater, which drew people from four states to its events. Him again. She had heard enough about that concert to last her a lifetime. Even her sister Renee was going. It was absurd that they were still advertising it. The tickets had sold out within twenty-four hours, but apparently the air time had been bought months in advance, so the station still ran the ads. The background to the announcer was a medley of Stratton’s songs. When the ad was over, a different announcer said pompously, “We’re sorry, the Neil Stratton concert has been sold out.”

“No kidding, Sherlock Holmes,” Kathy said aloud and changed the station resolutely to one featuring classical music. Renee always did that when she was minding the store for her—tuned in a rock station—and when Kathy wanted to listen, she had to change it back. Her favorite station was playing Offenbach, but for some reason Stratton’s songs stayed in her mind.

It wasn’t her kind of music really, but then, Neil Stratton hadn’t become popular by accident. His songs were lilting, sensual, and his voice had a uniquely seductive rasp to it. She had seen his picture everywhere; it seemed that when the media latched onto a favorite star, they couldn’t let go. As a consequence, facts about him were well known even to people like Kathy, who didn’t normally follow the music scene. He came from a rich family in Virginia—old money—and had been a Fulbright scholar at the University of Chicago. His songs scored high on pop charts, rock charts, and country charts. His two movies had received critical raves, and an Oscar nomination. He had won two Grammy Awards. He was one of those people who seemed to have been born lucky. It was enough to make you sick, she thought, all that success. Must be nice.

She put her elbows on the table and rubbed her eyes. Envy always flourishes on an empty stomach. Should she go and lie down on the couch in the back room, or should she take the walk to the store she had been postponing? Or should she go back to the sousaphone?

Her decision-making was interrupted irritatingly by the distinctive roar of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle on Broad Street. It did her headache no good at all. She saw the motorcycle flash by her window and then heard it revving for a moment before it stopped down the street. Someone thinks they’re James Dean. What a royal pain in the neck. Kathy rested her head in her hands.

She looked up when the door jingled. It was obviously the rider of the motorcycle—evident from the sand-colored suede bomber jacket and the helmet with a smoked glass visor he was pulling from his head. Oh, no. She knew it was just one of those silly small-town prejudices, but for her motorcyclists had a bad image based on old Marlon Brando movies where small towns like Apple Grove were destroyed by leather-jacketed hoodlums. He seemed to have a pack slung on his back.

But if the man in the leather jacket had mayhem on his mind, it was well hidden under the half-smile that was curving on his face. Heavens, what an attractive male. Specimens like that didn’t make a habit of walking into “Kathy’s Instrument Repair.” Somewhere in the back of her mind, Kathy was surprised to feel a tiny synapse that meant that somehow she recognized him. Try as she would, she couldn’t place the man. He was older than she—perhaps in his late twenties. Could he be one of her old friends from high school? Someone she’d been introduced to at summer camp? At college? Impossible. None of the possibilities rode motorcycles or wore leather. And the face before her was not one she would have forgotten readily.

He had nice features, though he wasn’t what she’d call male-model, pose-for-perfume ads handsome. His face had too much character in it for that, and a glint of humor that hinted he didn’t take himself too seriously. In a world filled with tension and pomposity, that quality was intently compelling. Dangerous. His hair was deep brown, full-bodied and shining. It was cleverly cut and longish, with an enchanting bedroom disarray from the helmet.

His cheekbones were high and wide-set, his jaw firm, and there was a tiny scar on his cleft chin. There was nothing particularly remarkable about his build—it was just the right amount slim and gracefully put together, though his shoulders had a look of strength to them. Good grief, why was she thinking about his body?

Feeling embarrassed, she raised her eyes quickly to his. They were pale blue—but, oh, what a pale blue, with an inner brightness, a calm study to them that was focused, just now, on her face. Instantly, she was taken aback. The man looked as though he could read every thought that passed through her head. Kathy didn’t often find herself at a loss with someone, but to her dismay, she felt rather intimidated. She hoped none of that showed on the surface. Her hand strayed self-consciously to the straggling curls on her forehead. She lowered it quickly. Shape up, Kathy girl.

He had let her study him with a certain cool and rather amused patience. In fact, it seemed disconcertingly as though he were accustomed to that kind of survey. Then, as if he sensed that she had completed her catalogue of his features, he lifted the shoulder strap over his head. In the silhouetting light from the window, she saw that he held a battered guitar.

“I’ve got a problem,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be able to help me?”

The words might be ordinary, but the man in front of Kathy had an extraordinary voice. It was one beat quicker than a drawl, and marked by a delicately sexual rasp that licked its way into her body through the spine. She watched him lay his guitar on the counter, his voice echoing through her like the memory of a caress. Good Lord! What made her think that? All at once it occurred to her that she couldn’t remember what he’d said to her. The effect of his voice had been so intense that the content of his words escaped her.

“Please?” she said automatically, meaning “I beg your pardon?” It was a central Illinois usage Kathy had picked up in childhood from her mother.

“Please?” he repeated quizzically. Then, correctly interpreting an idiom that was obviously unfamiliar to him, he said, “Oh, I see. Can you replace the tuning peg?” The voice again, a warm handstroke on her heart.

He lifted the neck of the guitar and showed her the broken peg.

The way a parent responds to a youngster with a scraped knee was exactly the way Kathy responded to a damaged musical instrument. She stood up, too quickly, and at the same time realized who she’d just said “please” to. She’d seen his face on Marijo Johnson’s chest. She’d heard his luxuriant voice on her old gray radio.

“Neil Stratton,” she said. Black spots shot into her eyes, spots that turned red, then green. Retreating blood prickled in her fingertips, and a hundredweight of dizziness spread its rapidly intensifying pressure under her skull. Heartsick and humiliated, she thought, Oh God, why didn’t I eat? I’m going to faint! And she did.

Which was how Kathy Allison Carter, small-town instrument-repair technician and piano teacher, happened to wake up in the arms of Neil Stratton, songwriter, musician, and celebrity of international repute.

Regaining consciousness was an unpleasant business that was like swimming to the surface of a heavily chlorinated pool after taking a belly flop from the high board. She was short of breath, her legs felt numb, and her eyes itched. Opening them with a few blinks, Kathy found she was lying on the old burgundy floral couch in her back room with Neil Stratton supporting her in one arm and gently applying a warm terry washcloth to her temples with the other.

“Could you drink a little?” asked the wonderful voice.

She nodded weakly. The hand with the washcloth left her face and returned in a moment with a paper cup, which was pressed lightly to her lower lip. Sipping the water, she became slowly more aware of his hard-muscled arm where it made warm contact with her back through the thin cotton of her shirt. He was so close she could feel his clean breath on her eyelashes and smell the spring breeze and leather from his collar, his hair.

After she’d fainted, he had obviously picked her up and brought her to the couch—and then what? The washcloth, the water—he must have found the washroom behind the stairs, looked in the linen closet for a washcloth, found the paper-cup dispenser behind the door. A man of resource.

“You know, I could see it if I were Elvis,” he said. Kathy could hear the smile in his voice. “I don’t get many swoons these days. It was charming, though, if a little old-fashioned.”

Carefully, she was lowered to the couch and a lemon yellow bolster pillow slid forward to support her head. A sudden and unexpected pang of disappointment shook her as his arms withdrew from her body. Somehow, paradoxically, the most important thing in her life became to disabuse him of any notion that she had fainted because he was—well, who he was.

Mustering one’s dignity is something of a challenge when one is spread flat out and disheveled on a couch, but Kathy did her best. Forcing herself, she looked straight up into the blue eyes that were studying her with such fine-honed perception. “I know how it must have looked, but it wasn’t anything to do with you. I was hungry.”

“You saw a hamburger on the floor and made a nose dive for it,” he said, his tone too cheerfully agreeable.

Kathy tried again. “The only thing I’ve eaten all day was a blueberry yogurt for breakfast.”

He shook his head in mock condemnation. “When I saw you, I thought—that looks like a girl who eats blueberry yogurt for breakfast.” His finger traveled to her forehead and smoothed back the straying tendrils that had gathered there. “Hang on, alright? Don’t try to stand up. I’ll be right back.”

He left her and in a moment Kathy heard the shop bell signal his departure. The air around her seemed still charged with his presence. The headache that had been threatening her all afternoon had disappeared. In its place had come a sweetly aching awareness in all the places on her body where he had touched her. Closing her eyes again, she flinched inside at the thought that she could be so vulnerable to a man, to his touch. It was a side of herself she had never dreamed existed, a hidden scar in her hard won independence. But then, Neil Stratton wasn’t just any man. Perhaps she could be forgiven for a flash response to the magnetism that drew so many people into his fold. How suddenly life could rearrange its laws to resemble a crazy dream—except that this was not the kind of crazy dream she was prone toward. When he returned, she told herself sternly, there would be no more heart flutters over Neil Stratton.

Kathy was just getting around to wondering where he’d gone when she heard him return, turn the front lock, and flip the OPEN-CLOSED sign that hung on the shop door.

“Do you like turkey?” he asked her, displaying a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil.

“But—isn’t that your supper?”

“No. Sandy always packs too much.”

Despising herself for being curious, determined not to let him see that she was wondering if Sandy was his latest lady love, Kathy let him put the sandwich in her hand. Then, as though he sensed her suppressed interest, and as though a natural courtesy demanded that he satisfy it, he said as she opened the foil, “Sandy’s my bass player’s wife. She likes to think that I need to be looked after.”

If Kathy despised herself for being curious, she positively loathed herself for the intolerably irrational and stupid relief his words brought her. Surely the man could have a whole truckload of Sandys for all the difference it might make to her. She pressed open the foil.

“Wheat bread!” she exclaimed with involuntary dismay, and regretted the words instantly.

“Good for you,” he said. Her criticism seemed to have displeased him not at all. In fact, he appeared to derive a certain sardonic amusement from it. Probably it confirmed some stereotype notion he had about her.

“I suppose,” she said, “that I ought to be grateful it’s not a vegetarian sandwich. Shredded seaweed, pâté of aloe vera…”

Good-naturedly, he picked up Kathy’s wrist and carried her hand and his supper to her lips. “Never look a gift sandwich in the mouth, darlin’,” he said, and settled his long body on the couch’s armrest with easy-jointed grace. To her extreme discomfort, he sat there studying her while she ate, offering her the water cup at acutely knowledgeable intervals. Darn the man. What kind of empathetic power did he have over her that he could tell so exactly when she wanted a drink?

“Well,” she said, after finishing, “I’m sorry now that I ate it. I ought to have saved it for posterity, it being your sandwich and everything.”

“Don’t worry,” he said pointedly. “I’ll autograph the crust.”

Rude of him to mention how she hadn’t eaten it. Straightening her back, brushing crumbs off her fingers, Kathy said coolly, “Well. It was nice of you to pick me up off the floor and feed me. Thanks a lot. I’ve kept you long enough. Shall we go and have a look at your guitar?”

“No,” said Stratton, removing the foil that she’d been balancing on her knees. “I know you can’t wait to reestablish the formalities and reassert yourself as a professional, but if you come bouncing out of that couch too quickly, you may end up on the floor again.” He found the wastepaper basket, disposed of the tin foil, and came back to the couch. He cupped her shoulders in both hands and gently forced her to lie down. This time Kathy didn’t bother denying to herself that she needed it, even though it was very likely that the swimming sensation in her head was caused by his touch.

“Masterful, aren’t you?” she said uneasily.

He smiled. “Just take it easy. You don’t have to worry. I closed your shop.”

“I noticed,” she said with a dry note in her voice. He immediately picked up on her discomfiture.

There was too much amusement in his voice as he said, “If being alone with me makes you nervous—”

“It doesn’t!” she lied, trying to give him one of those blindingly confident smiles her older sister was so good at. It was hard to tell from his expression whether or no. . .